Tower Health cut calls into HR by 54% and rolled out across seven hospitals in six weeks

Tower Health acquired five hospitals in 2017. That created a more complex organization and an immediate need to rationalize HR systems. The team had three months to get all five running.

That was the trigger for Dovetail HR Case Management, with knowledge management and reporting. Mick Schoenberger, Vice President Total Rewards and HR Operations, wanted a tool that tracked employee questions and requests, gave visibility of workload, monitored service performance, and produced consistent answers rather than a different answer depending on who picked up the case. It also had to be built for HR, with HR in control of change.

By 2020 a second set of problems had arrived. Around 25% of the workforce moved to remote or hybrid working, in an organization that had almost no remote workers before. Company information was changing daily. Tina Aquilini-Batten, HR Operations Manager, had to find a way to get employees information quickly without face to face contact and without relying on email, which people stop reading.

Tower Health worked through Dovetail's portal design process covering global setup and branding, portal configuration, content structure, portal case management and live chat.

Most of the effort went into content before launch rather than after it. The team decided the portal needed an HR knowledge base of 350 articles answering real employee questions, HR guides and forms, links into internal systems including the rewards portal, performance systems and the LMS, every communication that had previously gone out by email, and six core HR areas: My Benefits, My Health, My Retirement, My Pay, MyLife and MyCareer.

Question topics ranged from benefits, educational courses, FMLA and rewards and recognition through to updating a home address, across clinical and non clinical employees, hospital leadership, environmental services and dieticians.

Before rolling out, Tina and Mick met each hospital's C-suite and HR leaders to explain the plan and its objectives, then demonstrated the portal and took feedback. The leadership teams decided the sequence: hospitals were prioritized by the volume of employee questions and requests they generated, not by employee numbers.

Rollout began in July 2021 at two weeks per hospital, with separate rollouts for Tower Health's urgent care and at home entities. A seventh hospital, St Christopher's Hospital for Children, was acquired during the program and was included. The portal was live everywhere by mid August.

Calls into HR services fell from 40,606 in FY2019 to 18,736 in FY2022, a decrease of 54%. That freed HR capacity at a point when the organization needed it elsewhere.

Employees now reach answers themselves, 24 hours a day, through a knowledge base of over 325 articles. There were 11,384 employee visits to the portal in FY2022.

Under the tiered model, FY22 case numbers show 34,768 of 52,313 cases, 66%, answered by first line resolution agents at tier 1. Subject matter experts including HR managers and business partners answered 17,545, 34%. Cases escalating to HR vice presidents or the Chief Human Engagement Officer are rare.

HR services calculate a Net Promoter Score for the portal. Tower Health achieved an NPS of 53.

Employees can send feedback on any page they view, which reaches HR immediately. In one case an employee asked for a page to be restructured with a chart to make it clearer. Tina evaluated the request, spoke to the employee and changed the content. Requests like that are turned around within a day.